Keza MacDonald

Uh, I speak enough Japanese to be able to kind of, um, I had, I would have a translator in the interviews, but I could also sometimes skip it, like skip the answer or I could, um,

I could gauge the tone and I could sort of direct the interview more easily because I have a basic understanding of Japanese.

That really, really helped.

Because an hour and a half even with someone when you're going through a translator feels like half an hour.

Yeah.

So although I couldn't write fluently in Japanese, I can certainly do enough to steer that.

Yeah.

So I could pick up what made, particularly with people like Eiji Aonuma, I could pick up on what he was excited about talking about.

And Miyamoto loves talking about really specific stuff.

He got really excited talking about the placement of the buttons on the GameCube controller.

I love that.

Yeah, and he was really thrilled to just chat that through.

Yeah, and he was going on about the hexagonal guideline for the N64's analog stick and how many iterations of that there were and how proud he was that people could push up on it correctly.

And they tried it on the left, they tried it on the right, they tried it right at the top.

And so I could tell that because he was excited about that, I could talk more about, you know,

these specific details um and you know the only thing i ever got a complete like all of the pr people in the room nearly had a heart attack response to was do you ever see yourself retiring i knew i knew that that was a cheeky question to ask and i knew that uh i knew that he wouldn't answer it because think of the impact on nintendo's stock price so let's even mention the word retirement

But mostly I got what I needed.

There's a couple of mysteries.

I mean, there are always going to be mysteries that remain about Nintendo.

And I would love to see a fluent native Japanese speaking person do a similar thing and write a history of Nintendo from that perspective.